Chapter 7

A Selection of Classic Demos

Thanks to various YouTube uploaders, some classic demos are featured below, chronicling the European Amiga demoscene’s aesthetic evolution from its origins in the cracking world of 1989 to its peak year of 1994. As you watch, remember that each demo runs in real-time on a single Amiga 500.

Megademo by Red Sector (1989)

Mental Hangover by Scoopex (1990)

Jesus on E’s by LSD (1992)

Human Target by Melon Dezign (1992)

State of the Art by Spaceballs (1992)

Arte by Sanity (1993)

Technological Death by Mad Elks (1993)

9 Fingers by Spaceballs (1993)

Never Liked Uno by Lego (1994)

The ProTracker Sample Project

The ProTracker sample project from this chapter is illustrated below in video and, most importantly, audio.

Stage 1

Starting from a blank canvas, we load the shortwave radio sample and give it a quick listen. We set it up as the sole component of our first “track” (section of a song). Because it is a repeating sample, we need only initiate it one time; it then proceeds to cycle endlessly over the remainder of the track.

Stage 2

We load and listen to a drum sample. For our second track, we begin with a copy of the first. To this we add a repeating “four on the floor” beat via the drum sample.

Stage 3

For the third and (for purposes of this demonstration) final track, we again begin with the previous track. To this we add the same drum sample, but repeat it only on alternating cycles. The result is a bit of extra “thump” and a syncopated feel.

Those wishing to explore the world of the trackers in greater depth might want to start with this ProTracker zip package, containing the freely distributable application itself, both samples used in the example detailed above and in the text of the book, and a more complete song to examine and modify. Running it will of course require a real or emulated Amiga system.

I don’t host them here, but you can find disk images of virtually all demoscene productions on pouet.net. Fair warning: in my experience some of them can be tricky to run, as they’re almost always coded for a very specific Amiga configuration and won’t run on anything else. This can make some of them easier to run on an emulator than real hardware, if your real hardware doesn’t correspond exactly to the demo-maker’s machine. State of the Art, for instance, I believe requires an Amiga with Kickstart 1.3 and 1 MB of chip RAM, and may even blow up if there’s additional fast RAM. I was just looking at an early demo a few days ago that required Kickstart 1.2 — won’t run under 1.3 or later. Situations like that are hard to work around in real hardware.